In March, we announced an agreement to collaborate with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to ensure API compatibility between AWS and the Eucalyptus open source on-premise Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform. Beyond the details of the news, I'd like to shed some light on how I think this agreement helps customers focus on the larger discussion of the policies and business logic that govern application workloads.

For some time now, Eucalyptus users have implemented application deployments using a combination of Amazon AWS and locally owned resources. Indeed, the original use case for Eucalyptus was to support large-scale science applications that could draw resources simultaneously from AWS and a geographically distributed set of data centers, each operated by a separate organization.